


the heart of the storm

by ninemoons42



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, Angst and Feels, Canon-Typical Violence, Established Relationship, Fade to Black, Introspection, M/M, Reunions, Role Reversal, Snark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-22
Updated: 2019-03-22
Packaged: 2019-11-28 03:25:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18202853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: He feels like he's being hunted, everywhere he goes: if not by his actual enemies, then by his regrets, and by the promises he's made.But perhaps one of his hunters is the welcome and necessary exception: perhaps one of his hunters is exactly who he needs.





	the heart of the storm

**Author's Note:**

  * For [notavodkashot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/notavodkashot/gifts).



He starts up and out of a fitful sleep: and the first thing he sees is the mist of his own breath, the warm steaming wisp of his own shaky exhale. Curling straying furls of his own silent words, the words he’d been saying into the end of his dreams, his scattering thoughts of calling out names, and never even hoping to hear any answers.

In his dreams he’s reaching out for figures wrapped in swirling black, in chains of silver and gold, and they are fighting for their lives, too, and he needs to get back to them because _he_ carries all the power and the sword-anger of his ancestors in his very blood and bones and veins, and _she_ smiles as sharp and as keen and as knowing as the blades she wields as she dances through enemy lines. The two of them, ghostly edges whirling around him and real ones clutched in her hands: he’s seen them run riot through overwhelming crowds and leave nothing but bloodied bits and pieces behind, and he’s seen them turn and turn in tight spirals, shoulders to shoulders, always protecting each other --

But three can be a stronger defense than two. Three can be a stronger wall than two, especially with a child in tow: a child who’s learned to defend himself in his dreams, who’s learned to call his father’s own lightning out of his frail frame, who’s learned to summon swords in the shape of his mother’s own weapons, crystal-jagged cutting edges spinning and spinning around him.

Are they all right, in the here and now? Are they still fighting, the two of them become three, in the here and now? He’s lost track of the last time he’s even caught a glimpse of them: the distant crash and crackling cry of fire on the move, raining down from heaven, burning as fierce and as hot as the man’s rage, as the woman’s passion. As the child’s tears.

How he’d ached to disobey orders and run, run towards them and take up the child in his arms -- and the child had come from them, was the destined fruit of their union, but Cor felt a kinship towards the child all the same -- a child already bleeding around the edges from the crushing swords of his blood and his fate.

To be to that child what no one had ever been for him, not until he’d been lifted out of blood and mud and mire --

But he doesn’t hope. He can’t let himself fall into that: if he doesn’t let himself fall into that hope, for their voices to call back, for their voices to answer his wordless despairing questions -- then he doesn’t have to be disappointed that the questions trail off into howling silence, and not a word of an answer.

He doesn’t have a fate of his own, Cor thinks -- no soldier does. The enlisted know that for a fact. The officers -- remain only people carrying ranks and cords around on their jackets until they forget those ranks and cords entirely, and embrace the bitter bare truth once again. He doesn’t have the freedom to live and die on his own decision, not unless he wants to break the promises he’s made. 

Soldiers made promises standing straight and proud and tall on their own two feet.

At least that’s been true for all of the soldiers he’s ever known.

But Cor had made his own promises to the woman in the veil, the woman with the little finger on her left hand sheared away in some other small fight, on his knees. His head bowed and in so doing he could only see the mud crusted on the torn hems of her robes, the fraying laces on her boots, the blood dripping from her swords that were rarely, swiftly, at rest. Enemies freshly dead around them, and the ones who were still moaning didn’t even know that they had already fallen.

And Cor had made his promises to the man wearing the branch-shaped crown, as he lay abed -- half dead with a fever and the delirium of the huge wound that was still and sluggishly bleeding, having half opened Cor’s own side. Massive gash down his ribs that should have killed him if it hadn’t been for that same man, that same king, throwing him into the cage of a healing shield for just long enough that he had failed to bleed out.

And he can’t remember the words he spoke at her feet, the words he spoke from inside that shield, but he knows that the words add up to just one set of promises. The words to the woman, the words to the man -- a set of promises he thinks he needs to repeat, maybe just one more time, if the boy with the crystal-blue eyes is still alive and still on the run -- still learning how to hold his own on the fields of war. 

Still carrying his parents’ weapons, and -- perhaps -- learning what his own were. Fighting with those weapons of his own.

What would that boy say, he wonders in the here and now, if he repeated the promises he’d already made to the ones who had come before. To the mother and to the father.

Cor wonders even as the cold steals another sharp breath out of him -- breath and warmth he can’t afford to lose -- at last he turns his head and the fire he’d built from handfuls of splinters and half-rotted branches is only smoldering, is only adding its insignificant smoke to the mist that hangs heavier around him with each passing moment -- 

Cry, quiet and harsh and he starts, and almost reaches into himself for his own little access into the magic powered by the man and the woman -- his King and Queen -- there is a corner of that strange universe that lives within their bodies, that is set aside for Cor’s use alone, and in it he carries one thing and one thing only.

When he had first summoned that sword it had been half again as long as his arm, an outsized blade for the unblooded pup he had been, closer to a polearm and more than unwieldy, not much more than the heaviest and least graceful club -- but from that first moment he’d fought with it, fought it, as the sword it was.

It had only taken him a very long time to grow into the incredible lethal length of it -- he was lucky to have survived to grow into it -- 

But the thought is cut short by the rush of wings moving past him, flash of flight-shadows: and he goes tense, and he grits his teeth, and he catches his breath. Friend? Foe? No way of knowing, not in these shifting mists. The movement in the air that is half-reflected. The movement in the water that whispers to him, the ripple-waves, and that is the only way he can remember exactly where he is.

The mist shrouds most of the lake from him, in its eerie mirror-like faces, reflecting the blank bleak skies above.

Lake, and on the other side: one set of borders. He is in friendly territory, for now, or at least the other soldiers prowling through are more likely to be on his side, or under his command, if he can even find them. 

The story may or may not be repeated, on the other side of the lake -- they’ve lost contact with the Galahdians again -- nothing new or even alarming in these running battles. No telling if they’re still there, on the other side, waiting for fresh orders and their share of spread-thin supplies. No telling if they’re still on his side, because -- who knows? Who knows if they’re even still there? Who knows if they’ve switched sides -- and he wouldn’t even really blame them, if they had, if they have. He’s seen more than his share of strange things. More than ten men’s shares, a hundred men’s. 

Perhaps that was the whole point of the Lucis Caelums, and that’s not even the first time he’s had that thought.

He dearly wishes he could ask Aulea.

And the other part of him wonders what Noctis would say, if he asked him that kind of question.

Dreams, only dreams -- he can’t join them, he can’t run back to Regis, not for a long time. 

All he can do is focus on those he _can_ find -- the Nifs are a given, and he’d even welcome them right now, because at least he’d feel warmer, in a fight with them.

The Galahdians, however -- 

Again that bird-cry, and he hears it like mocking and he wants to return the sentiment in kind -- but he draws his threadbare coat in closer around his shoulders. Clenches his jaw against chattering teeth.

On his feet. The afterthought of kicking loose soil and other ashes over the fire to smother it -- he can’t feel any regret for the warmth that wasn’t even there, that he had only felt as a ghost on the edges of sleep -- he’s putting his cap back on and feeling, again, as if he’s letting his hands be drawn to the bared spot on the fabric, the missing badge of the winged sword fouled in braid-stranded rope -- 

Regis’s device and Aulea’s, and as far as he knows, he’s still the only person who wears that combined badge -- and he can vividly remember how he’d lost it -- 

He’s on his feet and he’s drawing his sword for real before his rational brain catches up with him -- the animal instincts of him are already forcing him down, tense in his crouch and the blade gathers the mists around him with his every shaking breath. Eyes darting, futilely, quartering the blank of the world and the whisper of the lake that comes from everywhere, everywhere around him and he feels like he’s lost his grip on reality at last --

Been a long time coming, that’s all, and a war doing its best to hasten the inevitables -- 

Cor leaps to his feet the instant he hears the song -- not a whistle, even he’s learned to run when he hears whistling that carries inhumanly far, that sounds too much like death-rattles -- but it’s a song nonetheless, a shout that’s been turned into a stone-carved melody, a storm-wracked song -- 

His blood runs cold in his veins when he recognizes all the sounds that the song is cutting through: the clanking, the battering footsteps, the weighted cadence.

So he screams: not to draw attention to himself. He screams, and strains for the echoes that the lake throws tauntingly back to him.

Not a single scrap of information he can use, nothing useful that he can hear.

What then?

Hands on his sword: he forces himself to relax that death-grip, the white knuckles, the stone in his chest where his heart ought to be.

And the first thing he learned was how to move with that sword, how to carry the entire length of it. The magnificent weapon, his and his alone, cords in ragged knots along the grip and trailing from the pommel-end. Red cloth, for Aulea, and the black cords that Regis had torn from his own sleeve -- he had tried to give those things back to them and they had refused him, and she had gone so far as to threaten him with a curse if he tried it again.

Steel honed to the killing edge, hair’s-breadth fatal.

Cor closes his eyes, and brings the sword up. The blade parallel to the ground beneath his feet; his elbows locked, his wrists and shoulders loose. Opens one hand and closes it so the fingers assume the right and natural grip he’s learned, to push and to pull the sword along in its movements. The same, for the other hand. 

He can’t sing, he’s never been able to, never had any use for his own voice but to spit insults at the world that still looms far too large and far too deadly over his own head -- over the heads of those he’s given his promises to -- but he calls out anyway, the words to that storm-voiced song -- 

As if they had only been waiting, taunting him with the wait -- the armored soldiers burst out of the mist with the first word, with the first unsung note.

Advancing on him with the bullets already in flight. Swords and axes already slashing through the mists -- 

He can’t sing, and he’ll never call himself someone who can dance --

All he is, all he really knows he’s good for, is a fight -- 

He steadies the blade and leaps forward, and the storm and its song guides him -- it’s the beat in his thoughts. His body moves in a frenzied whirl, and he slashes through steel and whatever else is actually moving beneath those carapaces, the cables threaded into the joints, the blank masks of nightmare-faces, and even as he moves nimble and easy along the sword -- even as he flows along the immense length of it -- he never stops trying to listen even as the song, the song’s coming closer -- the power of it thrumming and thrumming like gigantic footsteps on the move -- 

_O turn from me, o storm o faithless o fickle strike!_

He hears the command first: the song stops dead and it turns into words, too loud too close -- the words are in his bones and in his nerves and the only thing he understands from those words is: _Get down!_

The sword vanishes, and the MTs impaled on it drop with him and he only remembers to cover the back of his head, the back of his neck, at the very last minute -- the very last moment of static and hissing threat in the very stones and soil -- he feels the hairs in his skin rise, flutter once, go rigid and he -- far too late -- closes his eyes.

Blank the world had been as he had woken; blank the world had been as he’d fallen into the fight.

Blank furious light, now, is all he knows of the world: the flash that wipes out all his fear and all his caution and all his doubt.

With the first too-loud too-close shriek of the thunder he’s back on his feet and charging, screaming, and his voice is overwhelmed by the repeating and repeating blasts, and he calls out the words again and again, and there are edges in his voice that he slowly, slowly recognizes as joy:

_O turn to me, o storm o beloved o bright cleansing!_

The song consists of only two lines, one and the other, alternating, and every word is true, every time the lines are said.

He leaps, out of breath, and the alternating lines falter and he stumbles in his sword-rhythm, too, and -- eyes growing wide, only enough left in him to understand that the edges of an axe are falling onto him, and he can dodge only the worst of the injury, dodge the certainty of death and make it only a possibility -- 

He drops and he can smell the metal, the heat of its rush, and he whispers, again: “O turn to me -- ”

“And will you come to me if I call?”

“I,” he whispers, and he starts to look up -- 

“No. Not yet done. Cor.”

Whisper of his own response, too small, in the shaking silence of disbelief that follows. “Nyx.” 

He looks up again and -- whatever had been attacking him is simply gone. No more than a flash of a shadow in his memory, the shape of a soldier in steel, only a curl of smoke left.

How had it vanished? The answer to that question is standing over him.

Looking down at him, but there’s a hand, too, held out. Offered for him to take: “You called the storm.”

“I did,” he mutters, and the lingering electricity in the air coats his words in a crackling rasp. “But not for myself.” 

That beautiful voice drops into a sweet chuckle. Inviting. The whisper of the wind before it turns into a moan turns into a scream -- the last quiet instant before the storm -- the last safe instant -- 

“Why did I know you would say that?”

Instead of answering, he takes Nyx’s hand, and hauls himself to his feet. 

Looks around: the mists are almost gone, or perhaps they’ve only receded, and he can see more of the lake now than he’s had in the past few hours. Enough that he can actually glimpse the further shore, or the nearest spit of it, and -- flickering faint firelight. Another fire, across the water, stronger than his, brighter than his, and maybe it would be actually warm. Maybe it would actually make sense, this time, to go around the lake, to sit near the light of it.

It would be good to be warm, he thinks -- he’s nearly forgotten the idea.

“Your comrades,” he hears Nyx say, and he’s looking at the fire, too. “They are yours to command if you give them the word.”

He shakes his head, but the sharp bite of disbelief isn’t for Nyx, not precisely -- it’s for those comrades, it’s for those other soldiers. “And you know this because?”

“Because the storm chooses its own, and it chose them. Those men and women across the lake -- they belong to him. To my -- my patron,” and is that a laugh, quiet on the heels of that word? “He’s seen to it. He’s given them to you.”

“Your patron. Right. Or just come on out and say it because we both know who it is. Higher than a prince or a king or a queen.”

“Ramuh.”

And beside him, Nyx presses his fist to his heart.

If there was ever any kind of respect in any fiber of his being -- Cor knows he’s seeing it now, in the way Nyx glances up into the churning sky.

And he takes that moment to just look at him. So much of Nyx that’s familiar, and so much he still doesn’t know. 

So much he still can’t know, maybe.

What does he know, then? Broad shoulders, unbent, and the proud lines that no ink or needles could have etched into him -- the boles and branches and the finer and finer twig-shapes, like a mask of lightning-lace laid over his stubble and the proud jut of his nose, the twist of his mouth like sweet mockery and the coarsest most blistering insults, all left deliberately unsaid.

The marks that had been literally struck into Nyx by the favor of that same patron of his, that Astral of judgement and the deep strange unsettling calm in the very eye of the storm.

Wind rising in a moan, that stirs the surface of the lake into restless waves, all kinds of directions because the wind blows this way and that and seems to change with every passing second.

And with the wind -- the smells of the world grow sharper, till they seem to bite at his throat, till they seem to catch in his lungs, and when he inhales he winces for the pain and then Nyx is pulling him close. Compelling, those strange eyes of his, the blue shading darker and darker with every sharp exchange of their breaths.

He doesn’t fear this.

Cor tilts his head up.

Meeting Nyx’s eyes is much, much easier now -- even when the lightning-sparks jump from strand to strand of his hair. Lines of coiling light winding and unwinding into the braids that Nyx wears forward of his ears. The brief sting of the bolt that connects them -- whatever it was that made them the same for just that one moment, whatever it was that made them the starting and ending point of that spark -- that Cor breathes through and then he’s had enough of the waiting, enough of this unnatural separation, and he gets his fists into Nyx’s ragged collars and pulls, and swallows the gasp that’s almost a laugh and that’s also almost a sigh.

“You keep leaving.” Nyx, whispering, in the aftermath of that first kiss. “You keep saying -- you have too many promises to keep.”

“I do,” and it’s no surprise, not really, that he’s suddenly and finally flat on his back. That Nyx is holding him down so lightly. 

Why Nyx would be so kind is the real surprise -- they’re already talking about the reasons why Cor deserves far worse. Bruises and reproach, opening bleeding lines in his skin and deeper. In his soul, if he has one, if he still has it.

The last time had been like that: their bed the broken rocks and rubble and the shattered steel of a prison. The roar of the storm that had set the rhythm of their coupling -- the teeth-imprints in his throat and at his hips, that he’d worn for so many days and nights afterward, the blunt strength of Nyx and the fury of lightning and thunder, the crackle of that power that had churned sharp and nagging beneath Cor’s skin.

That had persisted in him.

He hadn’t wanted the scars to fade away -- and he knows they had, far too quickly. Unnaturally. 

“So do I. I thought you’d figured that out already. I am pulled away, too. But all I have left to give I still offer you. 

“So tell me: what are you afraid of?”

Where to find the words to answer that, Cor thinks.

The strange thing is that -- now he wants to answer, now he wants to say it and have Nyx actually hear him and understand what he’s trying to do -- but there’s that kiss, that had burned him so deeply and that’s left him wanting so much more. 

It’s the same as that last time, really, and it’s not the same: he still wants to be burned to ashes by the lightning-strike of Nyx, and he still wants to be able to walk away.

But, but not to run back towards Insomnia at the first opportunity, or -- not _just_.

To walk away so he can ask for more. To walk away in order to meet again.

And to fight, with every second and every moment -- every drop of blood left in his veins -- to live between the moments of meeting and parting. To be alive, and not just in Nyx’s arms, not just in the bright instant of being together -- 

How can he honor the promises that pull him in all different directions?

How can he tell Nyx he wants to add one more promise to that snarled and tangled knot lodged somewhere beneath his stone-heart?

In shifting, in trying to wriggle free of the stones wearing sharp bruise-grooves into his spine -- he turns his head just far enough to catch sight of the firelight as it flickers on the other side of the lake, and that makes him remember, again, what Nyx had been saying, about those soldiers.

Chosen by the storm.

Not by Nyx himself -- by the power coursing through him.

And it’s a struggle, it’s a private little war, to break away from the searing overwhelming power of Nyx’s kiss -- he doesn’t know how he does it -- he just does, and into the confusion clouding those oddly clear eyes he whispers.

“Tell me, what do they say, to swear to you and to your -- to Ramuh? What promises do they make?”

Over him, above him, covering him: Nyx freezes, for a long moment.

Something in Cor drops, lost unmoored free-fall.

“You would?”

Two words to break the spell.

Two words, and Cor tries on a smile: “Yes. If you’ll tell me.”

“And if I don’t?”

He looks away, to fallen armor, to broken steel. “I couldn’t blame you. I wouldn’t. I don’t -- even know why I keep running. Why I make excuses -- why I make them my excuses.” He can’t say their names, he can’t use the three of them now. Not as walls to hide shamefully behind. “You. You made a promise to something bigger than anything else in this world, and that doesn’t mean you can’t make other promises.”

Bracing for a blow is never easy, whether he’s on the giving end or on the receiving end: he does it now, and then looks Nyx right in the eyes once again. “I want to make one more promise. I have too many, I am pulled by too many, but -- I want to do it. I want to promise. To you.”

Silence like the whirl of the storm as it gathers, as it darkens, as it weighs down the world. As it bends the grass and the lesser plants to the ground. As it settles and creaks and groans in the trees and in the rocks. As it lowers, and even the lake-waves seem to flatten and shiver away into silence and stillness.

“They -- speak,” and the words seem dragged out of Nyx, on thunder-echoes. “I call out to Ramuh, and they speak to him. There are words to be said -- ”

“Teach me,” he says.

“Listen,” is Nyx’s response. “I said, they speak. The contract is made between them and him. I am not the one who receives those promises. I am not the one who returns them. You understand that.”

“Yes.”

And the smile, when it comes, is small and real and still startling, as clear as a lightning-strike out of a blue sky. “If you want to promise to me, it’ll have to be -- some other way. I’ll take it from you and return it, if it’s by some other way.”

He only needs a moment to -- know what to do.

The flash of his memory, and the words he’d never managed to get out, drowned as they had both been in that escape: because Nyx had been chained and shut underground, without even any way of smelling the rainwater running deep as it was absorbed into the soil. A prison made of rocks and not a window or a door or a vent in sight until Cor’s makeshift bomb -- a series of spell-flasks and one single fuse, lighting the magic for explosive effect -- shattering the prison, in the very heart of a furious storm -- 

And Nyx, emerging from that tomb, chain-links alight with storm-power as they splintered away from his hands and his feet. 

Cor had swallowed his words then, in the brief furious instants of coming together in the ruins: he breathes now, and lets them out, like those same chains coming undone.

“Yours. I think I always was. I’m yours.”

Over him, Nyx hesitates.

Cor breathes through that pain, too, and maybe he was expecting it.

“And if the others call on you? Your Lucians.”

The answer comes to him far too slowly: but fortunately Nyx waits him out. “I could ask you the same question. You’d go, if it was Ramuh calling. And I would go, if Regis called me. Or Aulea or Noctis. So? We find each other after, that’s all. We try to -- return to each other.”

Slow-dawning smile.

He returns it, small, hesitant.

“I like that. Return.”

And:

“Close your eyes, Cor. Just until I say.”

“Why?”

“I don’t want you blinded,” is the response, and something in him leaps and thrashes and needs, and he still has to make himself close his eyes.

The kiss, when it comes, makes him want to weep for its gentleness -- for the power that sweeps through him, fierce and breathless.

Whisper against his mouth, after another instant of the shock through his soul: “Now.”

When he opens his eyes the line of lightning that links him to Nyx doesn’t flicker away in the next instant -- it lingers, heart to heart and then down to their wrists to wrap into their skin, and then it’s absorbed into him and leaves behind a wide band in scar-rose.

The same as the tree-lines Nyx wears.

And Cor -- yanks him back and closer, the full weight of Nyx bearing down onto him, and he whispers, gratefully, the words from the song they’d sung in the heat of the fight.

“O turn to me.”

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me on Tumblr at my FFXV sideblog [@ninemoons42-lestallumhaven](http://ninemoons42-lestallumhaven.tumblr.com/) or at my main [@ninemoons42](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/) \-- or, hey, if Tumblr becomes too rotten and we can't talk there any more, there's always Twitter, where I am @ninemoons42.


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